[surewhynat]

I logged into an old hotmail email to recover a related account, and it had deleted all my messages because I hadn't been active for 12 months.

The more I think about it, we really do need a more distributed architecture. The whole concept of "the cloud" really sucks

[jolmg]

Email is about as distributed as it gets. How would you consider it can be more distributed? If it's about the ability to backup messages, you can do that with any MRA (Mail Retrieval Agent) program like mbsync/isync[1], or offlineimap[2].

[1] http://isync.sourceforge.net

[2] http://offlineimap.org/